Physics for Everyone today: Tevatron & the Energy Frontier

Rob Roser

Join Fermilab at 12:30 p.m. today to learn about the Tevatron’s contributions to the Energy Frontier. In his talk, Fermilab scientist and CDF co-spokesperson Rob Roser will highlight some of the discoveries and technological advances that experiments and workers at the Tevatron have made. He will also explain some of the searches pursued here and at the LHC that are key to understanding some of the fundamental questions of the universe.

The lecture is free and open to the public. It will take place in Ramsey Auditorium. No registration is required. There will be time for questions and answers. The lecture is part of a non-technical series about Fermilab science and culture. View previous lectures here.

Feature

Testing out the new and improved Internet today

The new Internet is coming and Fermilab wants to be ready.

Today the laboratory will take part in World IPv6 Day, a global effort to test out a new, expanded version of the Internet.

This new 24-hour event was created by the Internet Society to promote awareness of a new version of the Internet protocol called IPv6. Fermilab, along with Google, Facebook and other organizations that rely heavily on Internet usage, are actively participating by creating websites with IPv6 addresses and testing access to them.

“IPv6 represents the future of the Internet. Efforts are already under way to make sure we are ready for that future,” said the Computing Division’s Phil Demar, who is in charge of organizing Fermilab’s participation in IPv6 Day.

Computers and other networked devices use unique IP addresses to access the Internet. The older version of IP, called IPv4, uses a 32-bit address space, containing a familiar set of four 8-bit numbers (e.g. 131.225.103.37). IPv6 uses 128-bit address space. Its addresses are much longer and are represented with hexadecimal numbers (e.g. 2001:400:2410:50:3d8e:e20a:bf50:39e2). IPv6 websites look and behave like IPv4 websites. The IP address length will be the only noticeable change.

IPv4 supports about 4 billion possible addresses. The last blocks of free IPv4 addresses were assigned in February. The new IPv6 address format provides an octillion times the amount of existing IPv4 address space. Most computers purchased today are capable of using both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

Fermilab is currently working to ensure its public websites and email services will provide IPv6 accessibility by September 2012. The Computing Division plans to have IPv6 support for other laboratory computing systems by September 2014. A sample Web page is available for visitors to check if they have an IPv6 address for their computer or device.

Trapping antimatter with magnets

From Quantum Diaries, June 6, 2011

Researchers at the ALPHA experiment at CERN made major news today with the announcement that they’ve trapped antimatter atoms for 1,000 seconds. That’s more than 16 minutes and 5,000 times longer than their last published record of two tenths of a second.

The new feat will allow scientists to study the properties of antimatter in detail, which could help them understand why the universe is made only of matter even though the Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter.

These studies have been made possible, in part, by a bottle-like, anti matter-catching device called a minimum magnetic field trap. At the heart of the trap is an octupole (eight-magnetic-pole) magnet that was fabricated at Brookhaven Lab in 2006.

New data still have scientists in dark over dark matter

A dark-matter experiment deep in the Soudan mine of Minnesota now has detected a seasonal signal variation similar to one an Italian experiment has been reporting for more than a decade.

The new seasonal variation, recorded by the Coherent Germanium Neutrino Technology (CoGeNT) experiment, is exactly what theoreticians had predicted if dark matter turned out to be what physicists call Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs).

“We cannot call this a WIMP signal. It’s just what you might expect from it,” said Juan Collar, associate professor in physics at the University of Chicago. Collar and John Orrell of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who lead the CoGeNT collaboration, are submitting their results in two papers to Physical Review Letters.

The importance of giving feedback

From time to time we all want to know if we’re meeting our supervisor’s expectations. Regular communication and feedback within the workplace is necessary to prioritize gauge resources and even boost morale. Sometimes that feedback comes through a quick conversation, and other times, via a formal review process.

Starting this month, it is once again time for Fermilab’s formal performance review process. This process is important for the individual and for the laboratory. When conducting a performance review, supervisors assign a rating to their employees’ performance for that year. That rating normally determines a salary increase. But that is only one of the purposes for the salary review. Even though we are under a pay freeze, it is still important to continue the performance review process.

As we go forward in this process, I expect supervisors to honestly communicate performance and expectations of performance to their employees. After all, without communicating expectations, how can an employee know if what they are doing is right? The laboratory also uses the individual expectations set across the organization to inform progress toward its goals and mission.
Employees, too, should look forward to participating in this process, as it is a time to have an open discussion with your supervisor, a time to highlight all that you have accomplished within the last year and to set goals for the year to come.

This year, too, we’re trying to get a fuller picture of employee performance by formally requesting and incorporating feedback from an employee’s project or task manager. These individuals, sometimes called matrix-level managers, might not technically be the person’s manager or supervisor, but they likely supervise the project or task and therefore all of the work done for that project or task. If you manage others as part of a project or task, then please cooperate when asked for your input.

Please note the review form has been slightly updated to formalize feedback from matrix-level managers. If you have any questions about the performance review process, please contact Juanita Frazier, Workforce Relations Manager, or your division, section or center HR Generalist.

Safety Update

ES&H weekly report, June 7

This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ES&H section, includes one recordable incident: An employee suffered an abrasion and a strain when the chair he sat on fell apart.